Debunking 6 Common Home Remedies That Aren't Worth Trying

While it’s never fun—or cheap—to go to the doctor, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and make an appointment. While you may read a slew of articles online during your middle-of-the-night WebMD binge, the “natural” home remedies that some blogs swear by are often at best no better than placebos, and at worst actively harmful.

A new video from SciShow explores several home “remedies” that don’t actually help treat common medical issues. The nine-minute video debunks some of the "natural" treatments that people often cite as cures for ailments as benign as allergies or as serious as poisoning. Spoiler: Most of them have no scientific basis.

If, for instance, you’ve ever heard the idea that local honey can act as an allergy cure, put down the spoon. Despite being delicious, honey doesn’t provide enough exposure to the allergens that cause those sniffles and itches to help. When your seasonal allergies hit, take medication or visit an allergist instead.

How about the old custom of putting butter on a burn? Unsurprisingly, fatty foodstuffs don’t make great wound treatments. While people used to believe that burns shouldn’t be exposed to air, oily substances like butter will actually trap heat from your burn, making it worse. The key to treating a burn is cooling it off. You want to stick it in cool water, not warm butter.

If you are unlucky enough to catch head lice, you're probably willing to try whatever you can get your hands on to destroy the little critters. But that pricey medicated shampoo really is the best way to go. Scientists have found that washing your hair with vinegar isn’t the answer. Researchers have found that lice nesting in hair aren’t affected by vinegar, even when the hair in question is soaked for 8 hours.

Some of these home remedies seem a little out-there, but others are understandable. Ipecac syrup once had a place on every pharmacy shelf as a method of treating people who ingested poison. The syrup is poisonous itself, and it makes you vomit—but vomiting isn’t a guarantee that your body has rid itself of all the toxins, and it might just make it harder for your doctor to diagnose what’s going on. Poison Control no longer recommends keeping ipecac syrup on hand, and U.S. manufacturers stopped making it in 2010.

Tilting your head back to staunch a nosebleed is yet another common treatment that can backfire on you. Tilting your head back does stop the blood from flowing from your nose. But it means that your blood will flow down your throat instead of out your nose. So instead of getting a towel bloody, you put yourself at risk of choking on your own blood.

The last “remedy” SciShow tackles isn’t directly harmful, but it won’t help, either. Some people recommend treating pink eye by using warm chamomile tea bags as eye compresses. While chamomile does have some anti-inflammatory properties, there’s no evidence that chamomile is at all effective in treating pink eye. Draping warm tea bags over your eyes probably won’t harm you, and in fact, the heat may relieve some pain, but the tea itself isn’t going to cure you.

Dive into the facts behind these “remedies” in the video below. And remember: when in doubt, always go to the doctor.